And for sending me this advice on how to negotiate a dinner with Bill Murray, including:

• He will commit to memory the name of everyone at the table, making introductions each time a new person sits down.

• He will make friends with the waiters and give them nicknames. “Handsome” will now be your server.

• He will intentionally mishear offhand comments you make about the food and repeat them endlessly. You say, “seafood,” he hears “zebra.” You call the roasted carrots “exciting”; he hears “Poseidon.” As in, “Zebra! I never get to eat zebra! Want some zebra?” or “Have some Poseidon. Some Poseidon. Some Poseidon.”

• He will compliment the chefs by smacking his lips and crying out in mock ecstasy. If roasted duck is involved, he will beat his chest.

• He will take charge of the ordering and the serving of family-style dishes. If Handsome places the new supply of meats and cheeses with the cheese facing Murray, he will kindly ask Handsome to turn the plate around. “It’s the ladies who really want this cheese, and I just don’t want their nails coming for me when they grab it.”

• He will tell his most animated stories when you have turned away to talk to other people in an effort to make him believe you are not hanging on his every word. You may hear the word “tequila” coming over and over from Murray's direction as he mimes the pouring of a bottle into his mouth, and the tale gets louder and, apparently, more hilarious. When you finally turn back, the story over, and when you ask your laughing dinner companions what you missed, they will say, “Oh, just Bill talking about his early 20s.”

• You may, however, hear some stories about Bill Murray from movie producers also seated at the table. How, for example, he’s superstitious and won’t sign contracts until after a movie is finished, meaning the producers have to secure millions of dollars of financing and insurance on Murray’s word. (Which is apparently unshakable once he’s given it.)

• He might mention the Roebling Tea Room, where his son is a cook, and “they’re very proud of their kale.” He might then discuss how he likes to walk the nearby streets in Williamsburg late at night, and how he shot a movie on the south side when it was just Hasids and hookers, and the Hasids would stand outside late at night telling dirty jokes. (“They weren’t on the street reading the Word, I can tell you that.”)

• On the subject of South by Southwest, you may mention that you saw this video of Murray tending bar at a random Austin establishment. Murray will at first enjoy talking about this — about how he went to see GZA perform and brought him and RZA to the bar, where the bartenders told Murray they’d make more tips if he helped them serve drinks. He’ll tell you that he forgot that, GZA, as a major stoner, has no tolerance for alcohol, and that the rapper got so wasted after Murray gave him a shot and a half of tequila that GZA didn’t make it to his second performance at midnight. You might become emboldened to ask another direct question, something silly along the lines of, “I heard that you only served tequila, even when people asked for whiskey!” And without answering, Murray will stand up and excuse himself, never to return.

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible"

I was reading a book a few years ago about private libraries called At Home With Books. Among all the other millionaire collectors was Keith Richards, explaining his octagonal library filled with books about Nazis and other such. Asked why he had hardly any books about music, and I'll always remember this, he said something along the lines of "music is for listening to, not for reading about." (That didn't keep me from reading the 33 1/3 about Exile on Main Street.) Then the other day my friend Shelia e-mailed me this from the Times Online:

Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut . . . The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.

Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at Redlands, his moated Elizabethan farmhouse near West Wittering in West Sussex and in Weston, Connecticut.

In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s London, he found refuge in books before he discovered the blues.

He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”

Along the same theme of rocker's libraries I just came across this series of videos of Thurston Moore showing off his collection of rare poetry journals: